The Last Cavalier

The American edition of The Last Cavalier is fondly dedicated to the Four Musketeers who helped the book come to life:

   The Last Cavalier

                Alexandre Dumas

The American edition of The Last Cavalier is fondly dedicated to the Four Musketeers who helped the book come to life:

   Contents

   A NOTE FROM THE EDITER

   A LOST LEGACY, by Claude Schopp

   PART I    BONAPARTE

   PART II   NAPOLEON

   APPENDIX

   A NOTE ABOUT PREPARING THE TEXT

A NOTE TO THE READER

　　The Last Cavalier was originally published in France in 2005 under the title Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine.

　　A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

　　Trumpeting the words ‘an unpublished work by Dumas has just been found!’ is not the same thing as firing a cannon. The Great Alexandre, the most profligate spendthrift of his time, both with his creative energy and his money, had too many earthly needs to satisfy not to furnish at the slightest opportunity whatever texts piblishers might ask for because they knew he was so willing. He wrote travel sketches, literary reflections, lectures, humorous essays on all sorts of topics, and recipes. Such pieces, often insignificant and printed in the columns of a hundred newspapers, were not always gathered  together in book form; far from it. We are still finding some of them even today, and many of them have not yet been located.

　　But to proclaim the words One of Dumas’s great unpublished novels has just been discovered, and we had no idea that it even existed—that is not simply lighting the powder to fire a cannon. It risks triggering a literary earthquake.

　　A few years ago, had those words been whispered to anyone who loved Dumas and knew anything about his work, that person would have smiled and said, “That is impossible!” And he would not have failed to support his opinion by asserting that even if we have not found the original versions of all the novels and tales that the writer first published in serial from in the contemporary press, surely all of his important narratives have been published in book form, thus escaping oblivion. Dumas needed money too badly not to take such precautions, for publishing his serialized novels as books allowed him to ensure that his work would last for centuries and also guaranteed that he would quickly double or triple his profits (the contracts he signed as a serial writer remind us that he was perfectly capable of demanding that he be allowed to publish his narratives in book form as quickly as possible).

　　So we can imagine Claude Schopp’s astonishment and wonder when the universally respected scholar and premier specialist of Dumas’s life and works discovered almost by chance (but is there really such a thing as chance?) a completely unknown Dumas text a few years ago. After he read the text and studied its background, he realized that it was the last of Dumas’s great novels. “I imagine myself as fortunate as if I had discovered El Dorado,” Schopp writes today. We can easily believe that. For the novel in question, even though it was unfinished (and though unfinished, it is still a symphony of more than a thousand pages!), does not stand simply as our Alexandre’s last conquest. It quickly proves to be the missing piece of the gigantic novelistic puzzle in which Alexandre the demiurge planned to include all of French history from the Renaissance up until his own day, from La Reine Margot up until Le comte de Monte-Cristo. It is nothing less than the great novel of the Consulate and of the Empire, the same period that had seen the birth of our novelist and the death of his father, General Dumas, a brilliant who rose through the ranks during the Revolution and who was later broken by his rival Bonaparte.

　　All those knowledgeable about Dumas’s work had noticed that this piece was missing and assumed that the writer had decided not to treat that era of history, perhaps because he was too closely associated with it. Some have proposed that Dumas gave the best part of his father, who was a victim of history as much as anyone has been. So we shall not be surprised to be a legacy novel.

　　One question remains. Even though this major text had been lost(which, after all, is not unique in literary history), how could it be that no one even suspected its existence②. I could not help asking Claude Schopp that question the day that he told me about Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, which he had been editing in secret for the past fifteen years, for Schopp had the reputation of knowing everything there was to know about Dumas. (Legend has it that during his long scholarly career Schopp has gathered enough documents about his hero Dumas to have in his own archives more than ten thousand biographical cards, each one corresponding to a single day in the writer’s life from the time he was twenty years old until his death.)

　　Claude Schopp answered my question, but first he debunked his own legend somewhat. He said that he does not have a card for each day of Dumas’s life (although it is true that for many days he has much more than one card). He pointed out that even though we know many details about how the energetic Alexandre spent his days, it is rarely possible to know exactly what he was working on when he shut himself up in his study. So, for the time period that corresponds to his writing Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, the specialists know that he was writing a lot, even though he was ill. Sometimes he would cover the paper with his own large, beautiful penmanship, and sometimes he would dictate, if his hand trembled too much. But he did not use ghostwriters on such occasions because they were expensive and the state of his finances did not allow it. As for the fruits of that late season, people only noticed those that had the opportunity to garner public praise, either because they appeared on stage or were published later in book form. Those works include Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, a gigantic work that appeared only after his death; a five-act play drawn from his last novel, Les Blancs et le Bleus, which enjoyed quite some success while he was still alive; and a novel he had set aside sixteen years earlier, Creation et redemption. He finished that novel in collaboration with his friend Alphonse Esquiros, though it appeared only after his death. He continued to make regular contributions to Le D’Atagnan, his final journalistic endeavor, and also wrote short notes and “chats” that people kept requesting. For a man near death, that is a lot. How can we imagine that he also had the time to launch (without any help, we must add) into a novel that would be longer than Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, even though Dumas had only about twenty months to live!

　　Claude Schopp explains how this final mammoth novel managed to see the light of day and how Dumas was interrupted by death before he finished it. He also provides today’s reader the key for understanding the “Dumas mystery,” for though Dumas seemed open and transparent, he knew better than most how to hide the shadowy parts of his own character. It took Claude Schopp fifteen years to study the ins and outs of that mystery. Season after season he worked to establish the novel’s texts from the serial segments that Dumas himself had never had the opportunity to edit.

　　For as we know, when Dumas took back his serialized texts to turn them into books, he took great care to correct the text and change any typographical errors, any inconsistencies, and any confusing sentences that had slipped by him when he wrote the first draft. No one better than he could have presented the personal stakes that can be so clearly linked with the writer’s final endeavor.

　　He proposed the following preface almost apologetically, because he thought it was probably too long. He asked me not to hesitate, if I thought it necessary, to cut it down. That was not necessary. What Claude Schopp discloses about his discovery and careful research shows that he is very much like a Sherlock Holmes, though perhaps a more modest Sherlock Holmes. As for the long quotations from Dumas that Schopp uses to support his ideas, they are often drawn from hard-to-find or unpublished sources, and they are fascinating (as when Alexandre puts in his place the bootlicker Henry d’Escamps, who panders to those in power and who dares lecture Dumas in the name of “History”) and sometimes profoundly moving (as when the writer, then only thirteen years old, sees Napoleon after his defeat at Waterloo).

　　Let us stop here. Claude Schopp’s preface is indeed long, but so much the better. He has a great deal to tell us! Dumas is also long, much longer still, but his novel is more than a gift—it is pure happiness!

　　To some readers, though, the happiness will also bring sadness. For after the thousandth page, when we suddenly realize that the time for farewell is drawing near, we feel an unexpected lump rising in our throats.